Editor’s Note: This is second in a series of articles detailing Selma’s monuments.

On the grounds of the Selma and Dallas County Museum of History and Archives, known as The Old Depot Museum, there are two of the city’s numerous historic markers, each erected in honor of events occurring more than a hundred years apart.

The monument dedicated in memory of James Joseph Reeb stands a short distance from the low brick wall that separates the museum from the busy traffic at the corner of Water Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Street. Easily accessible from the entrance to the grounds, the monument is frequently visited by tourists, school classes and historians with a special interest in the struggle for voting rights.

Reeb’s handsome memorial is of Alabama marble, eight feet in height and set on a large two-tier matching base. Facing toward the museum entrance, it bears the inscription “In honor of James Joseph Reeb, 1927-1865, “This Good Man.”

Immediately below is a large bronze plaque with Reeb’s image. Beneath it is inscribed:

“Rev. James J. Reeb, an Army veteran and Unitarian minister from Casper, Wyoming, was working in Boston when Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. appealed for clergymen of all faiths to come to Selma to protest the violence that occurred at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965, ‘Bloody Sunday.’ Reeb responded by flying South for the protest march in Selma on March 9. A few hours after the march, Reeb and two fellow ministers were attacked while walking along Washington Street near the Silver Moon Caf and across from the C&C Novelty Company. The attack left Reeb with a severe head injury and he was rushed to a Birmingham hospital where he died two days later, March 11. He left a wife and four children. ‘The life of this good man that was lost,’ announced President Lyndon B. Johnson, ‘must strengthen the determination of each of us to bring full and equal and exact justice to all of our people’

The national outcry over Reeb’s death helped bring about the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”

The reverse side of the marker is inscribed “In honor of James Joseph Reeb, Born 1927, Murdered 1965.”

The monument was dedicated on Sunday afternoon, Nov. 15, 1998, in the presence of members of One Selma, other local residents and out-of-state visitors. It was blessed by clergymen, white and black, Protestant and Catholic, Muslim and Jewish.

The guest speaker was Duncan Howlett, first chairman to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. Howlett was the author of the definitive book on Reeb, “No Greater Love.”

The Reeb Memorial is the gift of an anonymous donor.